Screen Resolution Woes

After a few months of prototyping the site, including the design, this week we looked at how it appears on different screen resolutions.

We did this by using the Firefox extension "Window Resizer", which resizes your browser to the major screen sizes in use.

I was a bit sad to find just how small are the resolutions most people still use. Still a quarter of the world uses 800 x 600. When I resized my browser there, I was sort of stunned. You can't fit ANYTHING on that page.

As it is, the current design doesn't even quite fit on a 1024 x 768 screen, which is the most popular resolution.

Unless we ignore the 800 x 600 users, which I don't think we'll do, they are really bringing everyone else down because you have such a smaller canvas to work with. People have to design for the lowest common denominator, which means a lot of unused space for people with the biggest screens, who might be our power users.

One option is to create multiple versions for different resolutions, and maybe even pick the right one for a user automatically using Javascript. But that seems like a solution that is prone to break and to confuse and potentially to annoy users.

So: woe is me!

On the flip side, it reminds me of something my poetry writing professor (Henri Cole) told us in college: constraints were an opportunity to shine. He made us write poems that included a predetermined set of words that didn't really go well together. Maybe, by operating under the constraints of 800 x 600, we can achieve a perfect haiku!

(if there's room to fit it on the page)